


A Certain Kind of Madness

by celeste9



Category: Primeval
Genre: F/M, Inspired by Art, Pre-Het, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-08
Updated: 2014-06-08
Packaged: 2018-02-03 21:30:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1757511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celeste9/pseuds/celeste9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claudia has never felt like she is really part of the team.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Certain Kind of Madness

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Primeval Denial Art Prompt Challenge using [this lovely art](http://primeval-denial.livejournal.com/4369165.html) from lsellersfic, who also very kindly made the header. Thank you to fredbassett for the beta. I'm using this for 'beauty' on my Primeval bingo card.

[ ](http://s362.photobucket.com/user/ceteste9/media/cr-art-madness_zps0089443a.png.html)

Claudia watched them all troop in, Cutter in the lead, heading in the direction of Lester’s office. Connor had mud on his face but he was laughing with Abby, and Stephen was faintly smiling at something Cutter had said. None of them saw her standing there, and after a minute they were out of sight.

Claudia had got the updates. She knew they’d been through an anomaly; she knew it had been bad before it was worse before finally it was good. That seemed to be the way all of their little adventures went, the times when Claudia was there and the times she wasn’t.

But somehow she always felt like she was missing something. She lacked the simple enthusiasm they all had at seeing these creatures, enthusiasm that bled down from Cutter and up from Connor. Claudia could never seem to get past the danger and the blood, and the fact that none of the creatures belonged here. Claudia saw them as problems that needed to be solved and that was all.

She supposed that helped her to be good at her job. 

Knowing that didn’t make her feel any less like she was on the outside, though.

It was silly, she knew. She liked their odd little team: smart, geeky Connor and tough, sensible Abby, mad Professor Cutter and his indispensible assistant Stephen. She thought they liked her, too. They certainly preferred her to Lester.

But she wasn’t one of them.

“All right, Miss Brown?”

“Claudia, please,” she said, smiling at Captain Ryan to prove that he hadn’t scared the wit out of her. He could move silently as a cat when he wanted to, though Claudia suspected, this time, at least, her head had simply been up in the clouds.

“Claudia,” he said, matching her smile.

Captain Ryan was a bit on the outside as well, Claudia thought. He was there to be a line of defense and to kill when necessary, to be practical rather than passionate about what they saw. In that sense, perhaps they were a pair of kindred spirits.

From close up, Claudia could see the dirt smudged into the black of Ryan’s uniform and his arms were scraped, as if he’d fallen or even been thrown against something. “I think it’s me who should be asking if you’re all right.”

Ryan shrugged. “I’m fine, yeah. Expect I’ll be sore in the morning but it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

“You’ve had worse?”

His smile became less a courtesy and more genuine, making his eyes crinkle. “Much worse, I’m sorry to say. How’s Lester’s mood?”

“Bit snappy, but not bad.”

“Good. I expect he’ll be wanting a debrief, but I’d like to wait until the civilians are out.”

“Cup of tea?” Claudia suggested. “I’m sure you could probably do with one.”

“I certainly could,” Ryan agreed.

They walked to the break room together, where Claudia convinced Ryan to sit down while she prepared the tea. He sipped his gratefully. “Missed you in the field today, Miss-- Claudia.”

“Really? Civilians pestering you?”

“Well, yes, but mostly I missed having you to roll my eyes at the professor with.”

Claudia laughed. “Stephen wasn’t amenable?”

“Stephen’s as mad as the rest of them, he just hides it better.”

“Perhaps I hide it, too.”

Chuckling, Ryan said, “Maybe. I expect we’re all a bit mad, in our own ways.”

“Even you, Captain?” Claudia teased.

Ryan’s blue eyes shone with amusement. “Oh, especially me.”

Claudia hid her face by taking a sip of her tea. She thought she would quite like to discover exactly what sort of madness Captain Ryan possessed.

-

Connor was sitting at a table in the Home Office, waiting for Cutter to return from a meeting with Lester. The two men had been shouting at each other across the desk when Claudia walked by Lester’s office, so it was going about as well as usual. Connor had something in his hands, something that he was rubbing his fingers over.

“What is that?” Claudia asked.

Connor held out the object to her. “Ammonite fossil. Been extinct since the Cretaceous but there used to be loads of them living in the sea, so their fossils are fairly common. I just found this one, I was going to show Professor Cutter.”

Claudia held the little thing in the palm of her hand, tracing her fingers over the coils. “It’s lovely,” she said, mildly surprised that she was being truthful. She kept imagining what it would have looked like alive, swimming in the ancient seas, the shell filled with a tiny being.

Connor beamed at her. “You keep it.”

-

Claudia kept the fossil in her office. She liked to look at it sometimes. It helped to remind her that it wasn’t always death and danger, what she was doing. There was wonder, too, the wonder that Cutter had; Cutter and Connor and Stephen and even Abby.

Claudia had never quite got it, but she supposed that was why they were the scientists and she was the civil servant.

She rubbed her thumb over the ammonite and thought she could try, though.

-

The Forest of Dean anomaly opened again and Lester agreed to Cutter taking a short expedition through it. Frankly, Claudia could hardly believe he was allowing it. She suspected Lester’s thinking was that if he let Cutter win this small victory, he might not be so annoying and unmanageable in future.

She doubted it would work, but thought she would let Lester have his dream.

Claudia was going along as ‘the voice of reason’, in Lester’s words. She assumed that meant she was supposed to talk Cutter out of doing anything crazy, should the fancy strike him.

Mostly what she ended up doing was hanging back as the others explored, as Stephen pointed out tracks and the scientists chattered to each other. They weren’t quite in the same place the anomaly had opened to before, or so Cutter said. Ryan’s men set up a perimeter and even though Claudia had never been through an anomaly before, even though she knew there were things here that could kill her, she felt safe.

The Permian was all bright sunshine and blue skies. The air felt so _clean,_ and Claudia breathed in deep lungfuls of it. She was tempted to kick off her shoes and run across the plains like she hadn’t since she was a girl. She smiled to herself. What a mad thought that was - perhaps Cutter was rubbing off on her.

“Claudia,” Ryan called.

She went over to him, kneeling next to him where he was crouched by the water’s edge. 

“Look,” he said, and pointed.

Claudia looked, and then saw the shelled creature floating along through the water, squid-like tentacles poking through the open end. She laughed with pleasure. “Oh, look! It’s just like my fossil. An ammonite.”

“I know,” Ryan said, and the way he was looking at her made Claudia feel like blushing.

She turned back to the water, in time to see several more of the small, shelled invertebrates come into view. They were schooling. Suddenly Claudia understood why Cutter got so enthusiastic about it all, why Connor talked so excitedly. These things had been extinct for millions of years, reduced to nothing more than the fossil Claudia kept in her office, and yet here they were. Alive.

Beautiful.

Maybe you had to be a little mad to get it, to see the wonder there was through the anomalies. Maybe Claudia was a little mad, after all.

“Ryan,” Claudia said, not actually sure what she wanted to say at all.

But Ryan was watching her face, faintly smiling, and he reached out to brush a strand of Claudia’s hair back from her face. “Perhaps they’ll make a scientist of you yet, Claudia Brown.”

“I don’t know about that,” Claudia said, but the sun was warm on her face and the wind was fluttering through her hair and she felt free in a way she hadn’t in as long as she could remember.

Not a scientist, no, but she belonged here all the same.

**_ End _ **


End file.
